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Historic
Enfeh remains a mystery to its neighbors? but not to the outside world
Northern village has enough ambiance and monuments to make key list of
endangered sites
Stephanie Saldana
Daily Star staff
July 02, 2002
A day trip to the village of Enfeh is a journey
not only through history, but also through the bizarre. When I arrived at the
tiny collection of houses tucked on the Northern coast, I had never eaten a sea
urchin. I had never seen men ankle-deep in salt bogs, the water around them
glistening in the sun. I had never realized that Lebanon held the only town on
the eastern coast of the Mediterranean that, not unlike Jordan’s Petra, was once
carved out of the cliffs of its rocky surroundings.
Mysterious stone-cut dwellings, a castle, worn churches and narrow alleys make
Enfeh one of those rare villages where it sometimes becomes difficult to be sure
where real life ends and dream begins. Located just off the highway, 15
kilometers south of Tripoli, the largely Greek Orthodox fishing village is an
obscure hamlet of mysterious archaeology, hauntingly beautiful churches,
pristine swimming holes and a healthy dose of local hospitality.
I had been in the village less than five minutes before I was scooped up by
locals and escorted from house to house and church to church, passed from old
men to teenagers, with uncles and cousins as tour guides.
With charming architecture and a laid-back atmosphere, Enfeh feels similar in
ambiance to villages dotting the Greek islands and the more remote regions of
coastal Turkey. Locals spend their summers sailing and sunning around the
Beneath the Wind port, a romantic inlet of seaside cafes and white-and-blue
painted houses.
It was here that I was invited by local fishermen to dine on piles of
frightening, spiky sea urchins. After scooping out their orange insides and
sucking them off of my thumb, I decided that sea urchins are an acquired taste.
Lazy afternoons in Enfeh, however, are not.
The municipality hopes its recent initiative to
restore the 18th-and 19th-century storefronts of downtown will lure visitors. I
made the journey to Enfeh, however, to try to unearth a local historical
mystery.
Recently, a series of ruins and monuments here
have, unbeknownst to most Lebanese, been gaining attention from historians,
archaeologists and preservation societies around the world. In 1998, the World
Monument Fund added the ruins of Enfeh which include Phoenician and Roman
walls, wine presses, mosaic floors, a castle and two 7th-century churches to
its annual list of the World’s 100 Most Endangered Sites.
Making the cut is no small feat: The list includes such archaeological giants as
The Great Wall of China and Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
The choice of a remote village over such obvious
ancient cities as Baalbek and Tyre seemed baffling. But as I climbed above the
rocky cliffs of the port side, it soon became clear what makes Enfeh’s tiny
ruins so distinct. It is rare that ruins can evoke such an unexplained level of
emotion. Enfeh’s seem so unimaginably forgotten that their ancient inhabitants
could have simply stepped out for tea and chosen never to return.
Hanging over the rocky port, a series of stone engravings are the last remnants
of a strange port city that must have, at one point, been carved largely out of
the stone walls of the coast. Simple and stark in their detailing, these
stairways, trenches, tomb-like holes and even entire stone-cut houses are
similar in style, though certainly not in scale, to those found in the Nabatean
city of Petra in Jordan. Little excavation has been done here, and today these
carvings feel lonely and surreal, the last remnants of an abandoned city slowly
being worn out of history. It’s easy to get lost climbing along the cliff sides,
following ancient steps and stone pathways that seem to lead nowhere. Sadly,
today residents have taken to using many of the neglected stone carvings as
storage bins for fishing gear, and even the most famous of the houses has litter
inside.
Further on, the Crusader remains of the Citadel of Enfeh stare over the waters, separated from the main port by a
deep, man-made divide known as the Great Trench, a coastal version of moats
surrounding larger Crusader castles. During times of war, this trench filled
with sea water and the castle was connected to the land by means of a
drawbridge. Though little more than stone walls remain where the castle once
stood, it adds a touch of the bizarre to an almost unimaginable collage of
Phoenician, Byzantine and Crusader ruins that would do a Dali painting proud.
I climbed to the other side of the port and found
myself standing among the white crosses of a Mediterranean-styled cemetery,
nearly identical to those of the Greek Isles. A narrow path lead down to the
stunning and yet sadly neglected coastal
Church of Our Lady of the Wind, known by locals as one of the oldest
churches in the region. Once covered with brilliant frescoes, today the church
is open and abandoned, hauntingly silent, with the back ceiling torn out and the
front door vacant. Inside, the remnants of frescoes of the Virgin Mary are
ghostly thin and scarred, barely visible beneath the black stains of candle
smoke on the stone walls. Residents still believe that an icon of St. George
becomes visible only when blanketed with sea water.
Sadly, this no doubt aided the rapid deterioration of the church’s walls. Today,
it feels less like a church than a sad monument to the lost, and is alone worth
the trek out to the village.
Enfeh has a total of seven historic churches. I
walked toward the city center to seek out the Crusader
Church of St. Katherine, a beautifully intact simple stone church
constructed in the 12th century. With a stark interior, its most telling feature
is a fabulously painted iconostasis, or icon wall, with gold-detailed
representations of Mary, Jesus and the saints. Like most of the churches in the
village, it usually remains locked, though I easily found neighbors with keys in
an adjoining building.
I spent the last of my afternoon walking along the coastal road, until I arrived
at the remote monastery of
Our Lady of Al-Natour. Located at the edge of the village, the church is
situated among dozens of glistening salt bogs. All along the coastline windmills
turn and workmen trudge through the salt terraces, harvesting summer salt and
heaving white bags onto their backs. Known locally as “white gold,” this sea
salt, along with the fishing industry, forms the cornerstone of the small Enfeh
economy.
I was taken aback by the juxtaposition of salt
bogs, anglers fishing in a small coastal hamlet, and the domed Crusader roof of
the monastery. Suddenly, I could understand why such a tiny village had achieved
such renown in international circles. It seems all the more sad that it has
remained forgotten by so many living nearby.
Note: The picture of Our Lady of the
Wind church above is taken by the Daily Star.
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